Communicated on 9 February 2016
SECOND SECTION
Application no. 41317/15
Dimitrije ŠKRPAN
against Croatia
lodged on 13 August 2015
STATEMENT OF FACTS
The applicant, Mr Dimitrije Škrpan, is a Croatian national of Serbian ethnic origin who was born in 1956 and lives in Srbac. He is represented before the Court by Mr J. Doneski, a lawyer practising in Garešnica.
The circumstances of the case
The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicant, may be summarised as follows.
At the beginning of August 1992 the applicant was arrested by the Croatian military police and placed in detention in a military barracks in Nova Gradiška.
On 28 March 2011 the Slavonski Brod County State Attorney’s Office lodged a request for an investigation with the Slavonski Brod County Court, alleging that the applicant had been ill-treated by Croatian military police officer I.K. during his detention in 1992, leading the applicant to attempt to commit suicide.
On 3 January 2012 the Slavonski Brod County State Attorney’s Office dropped the charges.
The applicant then took over the prosecution and brought an indictment against I.K. on a charge of inhumane treatment of a civilian.
During the proceedings before the Osijek County Court I.K. confessed to having hit the applicant several times with his fist in order to extract from him information about some heavy weapons held by Serbian paramilitary forces.
The medical documentation drawn up during the applicant’s hospitalisation in the Nova Gradiška Medical Centre between 10 and 17 August 1992 showed that two ribs had been fractured.
On 14 November 2012 the Osijek County Court acquitted I.K. It held that “there is no doubt that the victim Dimitrije Škrpan sustained blows all over his body by unknown members of the Croatian armed forces while being detained in a military barracks in Nova Gradiška. Usually four members of those forces would enter the premises where the victim was held and hit him for several minutes”.
The opinion of a psychiatrist was also commissioned and it stated that the applicant’s attempted suicide during his detention in 1992 could not be linked to the applicant’s ill-treatment during that detention.
On 4 November 2014 the Osijek County Court’s judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court which, in so far as relevant, held as follows:
“It should be said that the conduct of the accused was illegal and to be condemned, because hitting a detainee by an official is not permissible and contains the characteristics of the criminal offence of ill-treatment in service or [in exercising] public authority which ... was not a subject of these proceedings and for which the statutory limitation period has expired (on 9 August 1998). However, not every criminal offence committed during an armed conflict amounts to a war crime against the civilian population. To amount to a war crime against the civilian population, inhuman treatment and inflicting of grave suffering has to contain certain criminal quality and intensity sufficient to fulfil the characteristics of such a grave criminal offence for which the gravest punishment is prescribed (then twenty years’ imprisonment). The conduct of the accused does not contain such quality and intensity because a few fist blows are not inhuman treatment which inflicts grave suffering within the meaning of the criminal offence of a war crime against the civilian population.”
A subsequent constitutional complaint by the applicant was declared inadmissible on 27 January 2015 on the grounds that it concerned neither a criminal charge against the applicant nor a determination of his rights and obligations.
COMPLAINT
The applicant complains under Article 3 of the Convention of the lack of an effective investigation into his allegations of ill-treatment and also about the results of the criminal proceedings he instituted against I.K.
QUESTION TO THE PARTIES
Having regard to the procedural protection from ill-treatment (see paragraph 131 of Labita v. Italy [GC], no. 26772/95, ECHR 2000-IV), were the investigation by the domestic authorities in the present case and the criminal proceedings against I.K. in breach of Article 3 of the Convention?
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